Chocolate is the new flavour for marketers

MUMBAI: Chocolate is no more a plain-vanilla product. It���s a perfume, a shampoo, a mobile phone, even a watch that claims to drip dark rich time.

Marketers looking for the next big hype are betting on the cocoa solid, as they try to evoke the age-old traits associated with it ��� richness, sophistication, sensuality, temptation ��� to sell off a variety of things to a wide band of consumers.

If the ���sensuous��� Axe perfume seeks to appeal to the women���s desire for chocolate, Marico���s children���s shampoo attempts to cash in on to its hot chocolate image. Titan thinks chocolate is an urban woman���s best friend, while LG Electronics feels a phone should be as beholden as a candy bar.

���When chocolate is used in a non-food context, it immediately arrests attention. And it helps that it is one of the few legal vices around...so it gives marketers something great to play with,��� says Atul S Nath, co-founder & MD of Candid Marketing.

For Titan, the ���connect��� was made apparent during a workshop for women, where they were asked to list their favourite things. Chocolate, of course, was high on the list.

���When we realised that, our design team visited a chocolate factory to observe the process of chocolate making. They drew inspiration for the designs from those visuals,��� says Suparna Mitra, brand manager of Titan. Titan unveiled its Raga Chocolate range, featuring watches resembling ���dripping chocolate��� in April and has so far sold about 30,000 watches.

Three years ago, LG Electronics also launched a chocolate phone, the KG800, which was brought to India in 2007. The company has sold over 10 million of these phones globally and is the process of launching yet another chocolate phone.

Sure, it���s the mass appeal and the high recall value of chocolate that makes it an adman���s favourite. Advertising guru Prahlad Kakkar is one such enthusiast.

���It���s been eaten for 300 years. It is an adult treat that stands for sin, smoothness, romance, sophistication and sensuality,��� he says.

Mr Kakkar feels that chocolate when used to sell non-food items, must be in sync with the theme, which often doesn���t happen. ���Condoms and lingerie are proper fits because they are easy to link to chocolate,��� he says.

Alyque Padamsee, one of the legends of Indian advertising, who now runs AP Advertising, says it���s just another fad. ���Advertising always thrives on fads and chocolate is the next big fad, like chlorophyll or lanolin, which companies claimed were revolutionary products. These gimmicks have always been around. Non-edible chocolate-based products were never heard of earlier. Maybe these products have recall value. But is that recall positive or negative? And just because 3-4 products have come out with chocolate variants, doesn���t necessarily mean its a trend,��� he says.